Saudi Golf CEO: "I will create my own majors for my players.”
Saudi Golf CEO: "I will create my own majors for my players.”
Majed Al Sorour tells The New Yorker he will "celebrate" a major championship ban on LIV players and says "all the tours are being run by guys who don’t understand business.”
LIV Golf’s on-and-off again approach to carving out a place within the world of major championship golf took another blow after the publication of remarks by Golf Saudi’s leader.
In an extensive story covering the evolution of LIV Golf, The New Yorker’s Zach Helfand pieces together various elements central to the league mission, fromhow Saudi Arabia sees a return on at least $2 billion in spending to date (sales of the wretchedly branded franchises), to the impact on a wounded PGA Tour.
Many elements of Helfand’s reporting will be familiar to those who’ve followed every detail of the saga, but The New Yorker staff writer also weaves in plenty of fresh reporting with analysis from experts theorizing on Saudi Arabia’s end goal. There are also several catty zingers from anonymous Tour players and the first extensive quotes from Majed Al Sorour, the Saudi Golf Federation and Golf Saudi CEO. He proceeds to obliterate LIV’s occasionally-careful, non-Greg Norman vendetta-fueled hopes of avoiding a fight with the majors and Official World Golf Ranking.
Sourer is described as a high school friend and fellow 12-handicap golf buddy of Yasir Al Rumayyan, governor of the Public Investment Fund and chairman of Aramco. Al Rumayyan was appointed by and reports to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Sorour was handed the Saudi Golf post in 2018 and is LIV Golf’s second most important decision-maker behind Rumayyan. He was prominently featured in last week’s trophy photos with Brooks Koepka and the winning LIV team. He was also the man too-old-to-be-wearing-a-hoodie excessively squeezed by Phil Mickelson in a scene that screamed, “thank you for getting me out of all my gambling debts!” Allegedly, of course.
Helfand’s September conversation with Sorour was arranged by Frank McNamara, a member at The International described as “a U.S. Attorney during the Reagan Administration and a father of twelve.”
As Saturday’s round started, he walked over with a man he wanted to introduce. The man wore pink pants and aviators.
“They called me a scary mother&%$#@*!” he said, laughing. It was Majed Al Sorour, the C.E.O. of the Saudi Golf Federation. He had a genial bearing, but seemed bothered by some of the press coverage. Unprompted, he said to me, “We don’t kill gays, I’ll just tell you that.” (As recently as 2020, an activist advocating for equal rights for L.G.B.T. people in the kingdom was arrested and tortured.)
Not the most advisable icebreaker to a New Yorker writer backed by the best fact-checkers in the industry, but at least it’s not tinged with malignant narcissism like Greg Norman’s “I’m not sure whether I even have any gay friends, to be honest with you.”
Regarding LIV’s near-fatal February following Mickelson’s comments to Alan Shipnuck that saw players pulling back on commitments, Sorour outed Ruymayyan’s esteem for the players willing to take PIF’s money back then.
Sorour told me, “I called the boss”—Rumayyan—“I said, ‘Everyone’s walking away. Do you want to do it, or not?’ ” Sorour told Rumayyan he had a plan: “Get the biggest mediocres, get the ten that we have, get you and I, and let’s go play for twenty-five million dollars.” Rumayyan decided to press ahead and announce the launch immediately.
The Biggest Mediocres might make for a swell rebrand of those last place Niblicks!